New Palo Alto lab for life science startups

Intern Beth McCarthy, above, works at StartX-QB3 Labs with Toby on her lap.

Intern Beth McCarthy, above, works at StartX-QB3 Labs with Toby on her lap.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

Image 2 of 4

Josh Robinson of Nirmidas, one of the companies renting space in the lab, holds a slide with nano beads.

Josh Robinson of Nirmidas, one of the companies renting space in the lab, holds a slide with nano beads.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

Image 3 of 4

Nirmidas CEO Meijie Tang (left) and research and development director Josh Robinson work at the accelerator, run by labs affiliated with Stanford and UC.

Nirmidas CEO Meijie Tang (left) and research and development director Josh Robinson work at the accelerator, run by labs affiliated with Stanford and UC.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

Image 4 of 4

Andrew Lee is the founder and codirector of StartXQB3 Labs.

Andrew Lee is the founder and codirector of StartXQB3 Labs.

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

New Palo Alto lab for life science startups

1 / 4

Back to Gallery

Two prominent life science accelerators in the Bay Area, StartX and QB3, are joining forces to open a lab in Palo Alto for early-stage companies.

StartX, which is affiliated with Stanford University, and QB3, which is led by the University of California, said Wednesday they will jointly operate a 2,000-square-foot lab near the Stanford campus. The space, which can accommodate up to 20 startups, is for faculty and students who are turning their research into commercial enterprises.

A bench in the StartX-QB3 Labs costs $1,500 a month and companies can stay for at least a year, said Andrew Lee, founder of the lab. Neither StartX nor QB3 will take equity.

Lee started his own biotech company, Stem Cell Theranostics, as a medical student and doctoral candidate at Stanford. He also coaches other life science entrepreneurs as a co-founder of StartX Med, the segment of the StartX accelerator program that helps health and medical startups sharpen their business plans, grow and seek partners.

In both roles, he noticed that young companies struggled with finding a place to work, since Stanford does not allow students to work on commercial projects on campus. Lee's company initially had to rent a lab in Sunnyvale for $4,500 a month.

Consumer tech startups don't need much equipment to get up and running, Lee said, but "one of the pain points common to chemistry, clean tech, hardware, medical devices and biotech is access to affordable and easily accessible lab space at the early stages."

StartX-QB3 Labs is open to entrepreneurs from the StartX program and elsewhere. Built by Alexandria Real Estate, a major developer of life science facilities in the region, the space contains fume hoods, a molecular biology core, a tissue culture core, an autoclave, a glass wash, workbenches and a hardware prototyping room. Renovating the space, which had been occupied by another lab, cost an estimated $1 million, Lee said.

QB3, which stands for the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, was founded by Gov. Gray Davis in 2000 to drive innovation in biomedical research. Its network includes several labs in the Bay Area and includes faculty at UCSF, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.

"Co-locating high-caliber scientific researchers within the resource-rich environment of StartX will significantly and rapidly improve the odds of success for these early-stage life-science companies," said Douglas Crawford, associate director of QB3 and co-director of StartX-QB3 labs, in a statement.

A few companies have already moved in, including Nirmidas Biotech, a five-person team spun out of Stanford and formed last year. Nirmidas has a nanomaterial used in fluorescence-based diagnostics, which it says could allow for earlier detection of diseases such as diabetes and cancer. Previously, the team ran its operations out of a QB3 lab in San Francisco's Mission Bay neighborhood.

"It's so expensive to rent a little life science lab ourselves," said Meijie Tang, CEO of Nirmidas. "To rent a small space here, it's affordable, and we can utilize core facilities and we don't have to buy everything of our own."